Photos, music, emails, bookmarks - your PC's hard drive holds an enormous amount of valuable information, all of which could be lost forever if disaster strikes. Unless, that is, you back it up with a little help from Norton Ghost.

The program is very easy to use. On first launch it will create two backup jobs for you, one to save key user folders (Documents, Music, Pictures and so on), the other creating complete images of your system drives. You can tweak these if you like, adding or removing folders or drives as appropriate. But when you're done, that's it: from that point Norton Ghost will get on with automatically backing up your drives and data, while you can concentrate on other things.

If it does look like you've lost any data, though, you'll be ready. The "Recover My Files" option makes it easy to find and recover any of your documents (even a previous version). Select "Recover My Computer" and you're able to restore your entire PC to a date and time when it was all working properly. And if your PC won't boot, that's not a problem. Just start Ghost from its own recovery disc and it'll soon have your system back in full working order.

Perhaps the best part of Norton Ghost, though, is its configurability, the extra features and functionality available all over the program.

So you don't only have to schedule backups to run at a particular time. Ghost can also launch them when you run a particular program, when an application is installed or uninstalled, when certain users log on or log off your PC, and more.

Your chosen backups can then be compressed, and password-protected for extra privacy.

They can be saved to local drives, Blu-ray discs, across the network, even to an FTP server.

And while this is all easy enough for just about anyone to use, Norton Ghost does have some more advanced extras, including the ability to convert your last backup into a virtual drive for access in a virtual machine.